


Please Won't You Be My Neighbor?

by florahart



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: AU: meeting on base, Clint can shoot anything, Clint is willing to work around Phil's issues, M/M, Phil has some probably-undiagnosed and not well-examined PTSD, Rehab sucks, Temporary Breakup, breaking up over falling for each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-30
Updated: 2017-08-30
Packaged: 2018-12-21 14:09:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11945886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/florahart/pseuds/florahart
Summary: Clint's stuck on a base while he heals up and goes through all kinds of requalification testing.  His neighbor in the on-base housing is working on some issues of his own.





	Please Won't You Be My Neighbor?

**Author's Note:**

> This was written as a guest post for Tumblr: imagineclintcoulson, for two prompts:
> 
> Get-together AU (could also be canon divergence) where they meet in military hospital/rehabilitation.  
> and  
> Clint & Phil do the friends with benefits thing, until one of them back off because oh look! One of them fell in love with the other. 
> 
>  
> 
> This is sort-of AU in that it's not necessarily exactly SHIELD that they work for -- it's somewhat military (ish?), and takes place on a base most of the time, but it's not built from any particular real base, except in that one of my uncles was military and was for a while on a US base that had some hut things sort of like these for base housing. I have no idea how common that is, but anyway, so imagine it's militaryesque nonspecific, but with something along the lines of SHIELD's covert operations tendency.

Requalifying, in Clint's (repeatedly) considered opinion, sucked. 

It wasn't like he hadn't had unwanted downtime before. Bolivia: a brand new hole in his thigh and a seriously unfunny gash one fucking inch from his left nut; Monaco: busted ankle, two cracked ribs, and a motherfucker of a concussion; Greenland: what the hell, what fuckhat decided to engage in ice cube espionage in the dark all winter, was what Clint wanted to know about that, and that was _before_ the fall, the cracked tailbone, and the compound fracture to the collarbone. All of those times he'd done his rehab like a good boy (okay, not like a good boy. Like a sullen pissy boy, but still), and then they'd made him do weeks of requal on every firearm he commonly used and usually a few he'd rather just throw, apparently because someone in HR or HQ or some other H thing thought it was funny to drive him up, over, and through the wall.

After all, it wasn't like he didn't make sure the rehab included making sure his shooting was what it should be, and if the PT guy didn't give him stuff that would support that goal, he just went and found someone who would. He'd requal'ed on the bow on the first try even after the collarbone, so he had more than a little evidence backing him up, too. It was all just fucking pointless, seriously, and while he didn't _mind_ working his ass hard enough to have the shakes all over, still, he liked for it not to be for a _stupid_ reason. Damn it.

So PT had been his first stop once they actually let him out of Medical, and Requal for a schedule (which they were apparently all about taking one’s time with; who the fuck needed to do handguns and rifles days apart? Come on. It wasn’t like there was a whole bunch of new principles to learn or something!) had been second, and fine, maybe he was kind of in a mood anyway because Medical was not his favorite place to be and also they never let him climb anything even if he totally could and also their food was shit, but now he was done for the day, with an appointment for a second verse, same as the first, tomorrow, and woohoo, his evening's agenda was a stop at the quartermaster for keys and then an exciting evening of counting the bumps in that texture stuff on the ceiling. 

Yeah, injury-associated downtime? Completely designed by assholes.

He chucked his gear in the corner of his temporary quarters, the third-over/second-up boring box of pre-assembled hut in a boring block of boring box huts two boring blocks of boxes over from the commissary, and went to look in the ostensibly supplied-and-ready fridge.

Uh-huh, supplied with water, air, and a box of clumped-up baking soda. The three MREs, all mouse-nibbled, in the cabinet, completed the promised supply of edibles. Awesome. Probably that meant the sweatpants and socks he'd requisitioned on his way out of Medical were also neither present nor accounted for, and _that_ meant he could either shower and then put back on his sweaty crap, which, not the worst thing he'd ever worn, obviously, but since the one actual benefit of life on a base was that there was always hot water, available foodstuffs, and clean laundry, it was obnoxious, _or_ , he could go tear someone a new orifice of some sort, get clothes and food, and _then_ shower. 

Or, he could strip, shower, eat the jerky in his bag, and go to bed. That sounded pretty promising, except for how putting on dried-stiff sweaty clothing was also not on his top ten list of ways to start the morning and also, come _on_ getting away from shitty food was one of the reasons he was happy about getting _out_ of Medical and jerky had a time and place but now was not it. He looked in the cabinet again. "Seriously?" he asked the empty shelves. "Not even _instant barely-drinkable fake coffee_?" He threw up his hands, hit the light, and headed for the door, then stopped and doubled back for his wallet because he fucking knew if he went down to find someone to fix his supply problem without every conceivable piece of ID on his person there would just be a hundred reasons to hate everyone, and movement out the window caught his eye.

In the identical structure across from him, all of about six feet away because temp box-huts were not noteworthy for their prominent lawns and only pretended by having the front doors and “back yards” (four by eight feet of painted grass) alternate directions that they were not uncomfortably close together, a middle-aged man, slightly balding, was removing the clothes of a bureaucrat (which probably meant he was one of the HR types who wanted him to requal). Clint didn't know why he stopped to watch (little creepy, right? Spying on a guy on base for _no reason_?), but hey, any true intel is good intel, and it was hardly his fault the guy didn't know there was anyone across the way; the angle probably meant that only someone standing just right here could see through from the front of one living area to the back of the other. So he stood there at his dented and uninspiring blinds in the dark and watched.

Which was why, when the guy was down to boxers and socks and hard muscle under the suit, Clint got to see him do some of the quasi-yoga halfway-jiu-jitsu stuff Clint was way too familiar with from PT, and also got to see a particularly excellent array of scars and marks, several of them the hallmarks, in combination with the aforementioned hard muscle, of the kind of badassery that made Clint drool.

Fine, maybe not one of the HR types. Maybe just temporarily riding a desk? Clint shuddered at the prospect that one day, in five years or ten, rehabbing an injury might very well be a slow enough game for him that he'd suffer a similar fate.

He stared through another round of stretches and slow but forceful strikes and kicks, and then ran his hand through his (ugh, sweat-stiff) hair and remembered he had a date with someone over in Supply. A date that was going to involve sarcasm, glaring, and a significant discussion in which his side was primarily the expression of expectations unmet by country miles and/or broad sides of barns. 

Well, it was better than most of his social life.

He gave one more glance through the window at Badass Desk Jockey, now working a series of poses that involved a hand balance and various positions for legs pointing every direction (did that even count as crow pose any more?), then shoved his ID in his pocket with his keys and went out the door.

\--

It would have been a pretty great idea to finish checking out the supply situation before going in, Clint realized, fifty minutes and a couple of sandwiches later. Because then he would have known to ask for hey toothpaste, a towel that was not the single threadbare one hanging on the wobbly rack, or, stay with him here, maybe a shower curtain. What the hell was the supply office even _doing_? Oh yeah, and soap would have been a pretty great improvement, too.

Damn it.

Well, he had a travel size toothpaste and some kind of mini hotel “body wash” which probably was close enough even though it smelled like vanilla flowers, in his gear, and … seriously, no toilet paper? Come on. Why. Well, he didn’t need any right _now_ , and if all else failed he probably had some wadded up napkins with the jerky in his bag too, and anyway he was definitely not going back out tonight. He pointed the shower head into the enclosure as best he could, turned on the hot water, and stood under it rubbing himself with vanilla smells, ignoring the spatter situation on the floor. The tile didn’t really have an edge on it, so when he got out he just shoved the water toward the drain with his foot and mopped up a little with his dirty clothes, then hung those over the curtainless showerfront and dried off with the towel. Which felt like unevenly-used sandpaper, and which was so small that even his short hair and bare skin nearly overwhelmed it.

Well, at least it would probably have dried by morning; it didn’t have enough substance to actually hold water for too many hours. He had enough paste left in the travel tube to achieve minty freshness, more or less, and probably enough for morning too, so in all, he was approximately refreshed? Close enough. He applied bandaids (Superman, possibly filched from a house during his last assignment which had had no other indications of kids so he didn’t feel that bad about it) on two small cuts on his hands he didn’t remember acquiring and one long scratch on his neck and chest that he did (hey Medical, don’t sneak up on a sniper with an open needle come on he’s going to try to change your plans), and called it good.

Finally, he left the bathroom and went into the bedroom, stretched out flat on the pillowless (hey, the presence of a mattress was a happy fucking surprise here) bed with one folded up scratchy blanket stuffed into the pillowcase and the other tossed out over him, and went to sleep.

For a wonder, the curtains in the bedroom weren’t half bad, so it was nearly eight by the time he woke up despite the fact that the window faced just south of east past the front stoop of Desk Jockey’s place. He glanced out that way as he pulled his supply-run clothes out of their wrappers and to his surprise, the guy was out there, dressed, and coming this way, through the tiny alley between their quarters. Clint shook out and put on his new sweatpants, then ran his fingers through his hair and yanked a hoodie over his head.

The knock at the door still managed to startle him even though he’d seen the guy coming, mostly because he’d just spent nearly four months in spaces where no one afforded the courtesy of knocking – recently, Medical, and before that, a fairly shitty shack behind an auto shop in a tiny town in rural Tennessee, rented for a hundred bucks a month in exchange for cash and a promise to keep his mouth shut about the eighty or ninety daily illegal events witnessed (he hadn’t ultimately kept that promise; this was how he’d wound up in Medical although to be fair since uprooting their supply line and reporting on them was why he’d been sent in in the first place, he’d had a prior obligation that rendered his word moot). In any case, he was no longer accustomed to amazing social principles like privacy or appropriate consideration for the needs of others.

He opened the door faster than he meant to, bouncing it off the adjacent wall in his startlement. “Uh. Hi?”

“Phil Coulson,” Desk Jockey said, sticking out his hand. “Currently with the quartermaster’s office.”

“Uh. Okay, so you’re to blame for the stock situation in this apartment that doesn’t even have enough food to be interesting to mice?”

So, yeah, it seemed like he was integrating right back into society like a boss. He mentally facepalmed, but stood his ground.

“Arguably, but the actual problem is that you’re in the wrong quarters.”

“Nah, just assigned last night.”

Desk Jockey, Coulson, shook his head. “No, I mean, there should not be anyone assigned here because I am still too likely to snap and murder my neighbors in their sleep.” He shrugged. “Quartermaster’s is a temporary assignment, so I’m sure we haven’t supplied here and I’d have put a stop to it if we were asked to.”

Clint narrowed his eyes. “All right, so not that I don’t believe you could possibly murder me in my sleep, although I gotta tell you, I’m not a pushover—“

“This is a military base. More or less. Paramilitary. The pushover population is not a large proportion.”

“Kay, whatever, but anyway I mean, I saw your yogilates or whatever the shit you were doing over there last night, and I believe you that you’re a badass, but I also am a sniper with a history of, of let’s say acrobatic streetfighting, so like, I wouldn’t go down easy.”

“I’m not saying you would. I’m saying, until I manage a full week without waking up with a knife in my hand and one or more nearby objects stabbed, I’m not letting anyone be assigned into adjacent quarters.”

Clint stared. “O…kay, so like, for one thing that’s bullshit because if you were seriously that psychologically fucked there’s no way they would let you out or let you possess knives. For another thing, oh hey, you could get rid of your knives for a while if they did?”

“I’m level eight.”

“So?”

“So holding or restricting me is a special problem.”

“Pssht, doesn’t mean they wouldn’t find a way if you were _that much_ of a danger to self and others. Anyway, you could still choose to restrict yourself.”

“Would you?”

“Would I what?”

“Get rid of your knives?”

“Nah, but they’re not where you’d find them while you were sleepmurdering, so eh, and also I promise you I am better with them than you will ever be so you would not win. Plus, have you actually managed to break into an adjacent property yet?”

“Not having done so doesn’t prove I won’t. This is why you should go get your orders corrected.”

“Neither does making it eight days. Are you in a position to make it an order?”

“As previously noted, I am currently assigned—“

“Yeah, but they’re logistics, not policy. So, is this an order? Technically?”

“…No. But you’re not safe here.”

“Yeah, so I work for a military organization, paramilitary, whatever, where my job is to go in and hobnob with the elements that need eliminating from society. Safe ain’t a thing. Anyway, back to your sleepmurdering problem: PTSD is a bitch, and it’ll sneak up when you’re not looking. Figure out how to be as safe-for-others as you can, and just know it’s never gonna be perfect, is my advice. Hey, so what are you—I figure if you’re up and fighting and not just panicking uselessly you’re working on some epic flashback. What’s the scene?”

Coulson just looked at him. 

“In your flashback? What are you dealing with? ‘less it’s like confidential or something, I mean, but like, if you gotta stab I guess you feel like it’s a threat. Also, now that I have everything either here or being sent over, I don’t wanna move again, so like, I’m staying put.” Clint rolled his shoulders. “Hey, I did have them give me coffee and I bought stuff for toast and bacon last night, and I’m starving, so if you wanna keep talking about how I’m staying unless ordered, you’re gonna have to do it while I make breakfast.” He turned away from the door and stepped six feet across the front of the hut to the fridge, leaving his front door standing open. 

After a good thirty seconds, in which Clint remembered he’d even gotten real eggs, Coulson came in and shut the door. “What the hell is yogilates?”

“What’s it sound like? It’s like if yoga and Pilates got married and had a baby, and then snooty people raised it.”

“And you stood around watching me do it. In my underwear.”

“Hey, it’s not like there’s a TV. I looked out the window and there you were, so, you know, maybe close the shades?”

“Shouldn’t have been anyone in here.”

“And yet.” Clint set out a pan—that, apparently, lived here regardless of food—and turned on the oven broiler, then asked, “You staying for eggs? I’ll keep all the knives out of arms’ reach, just in case.”

Coulson scowled at him. “Sniper, huh?”

Clint nodded. “If I can see it, I can shoot it. And unless there’s a building or something in the way, I can see it.”

“You’re Hawkeye.”

“Why do you say that?” Clint started bacon frying and pulled out four pieces of bread for toast. A quick trawl through the drawers showed zero potholders, because obviously, so he went and fetched his threadbare towel from last night and folded it in quarters. Close enough for pulling out an oven rack.

“You were due back from a thing in, hm. Tennessee?”

“Either you’re really good at picking up subtle speech patterns someone might take on while under, or you’re well-informed. Unless I’m not him and you just gave him up.”

“You’re him. Southpaw. Raised in the Midwest. Acrobatic streetfighter. Usually covered in bandaids.”

Clint snorted. “My jacket really say that last one? I mean, it’s true; I am fucking _great_ with throwing a knife, but not that good at not cutting myself in the process.” He eyed Coulson and gave a shrug, deciding to go ahead and confirm his identity because why not, ninja yogi with PTSD seemed like a safe enough choice for secrets. “I mean, still, if the weapon was knives, I’d win, between me and, um anyone, because like I said, if I can see it…”

“You said you can _shoot_ it, but you’re not just a sniper at all. Just because I didn’t know your face doesn’t mean I haven’t read the file.”

“Because that’s faster than saying I can hit it with any projectile weapon that has the range, and I can get into a position to do so even if the perch is difficult. If you know my name, you know that mostly when I shoot it’s arrows if it’s my call, and still my kill rate is kind of unmatched. When I’m trying to kill, I mean. When I’m not, it’s real close to zero, because killing people by accident is super not my game.”

“Difficult, huh? You think highly of yourself.” Coulson sat down on the more duct-taped of the two vinyl chairs at the rickety round-cornered table.

“I should have you talk to my shrink,” Clint replied. “He says I got self-image problems. But shooting and climbing, that stuff, that’s not me, just a skill I have. Not even a skill. More of a talent. Born that way and it’s great for making me useful, but else, eh.”

“I see.” 

Clint flipped the bacon and put bread on the top oven rack, then poured off some of the grease into the other frying pan and started cracking eggs.

“It may be a talent, and I’ll grant that the eyesight required is probably god-given, but I think it’s pretty likely the practice you’ve done over the course of your life makes it also a skill, and the dedication to that practice is probably you.”

“You a life coach on the side or something? Do you write inspirational posters?”

“No. However, assessing skills and personalities is a significant aspect of my job here, and I call ‘em like I see ‘em.”

Clint squirmed a little, one hand to the back of his neck, and changed the subject. “Kay, so like, you? Do you kill people by accident?”

“So far, no.”

“But you think you’re gonna start.”

“No, I think PTSD and failure of self-control are only vaguely related, although I confess they do feel fairly intertwined.”

“All true. Still, I figure if you have all these mad skills you would have been detained, and you’d have been willing to stay put, if anyone but you was adding everything up and coming up with danger, so...” Clint stuck his hand in to flip the toasting bread, then yelped when he singed the hair on the back of his wrist because what do you know, the heating element gets hot. “Dammit.”

“Sink, cold water,” Coulson said. He pointed and shooed Clint that way.

“Yeah, yeah.” Clint ran the faucet and stuck his hand in the water, watching Coulson stand and take over breakfast. After a minute, with the sting eased, he turned off the tap, sighed about the lack of towel, and got out both plates and all the silverware he could find. “So, seriously, quartermaster, you leave two frying pans, but only one fork, two spoons, a steak knife, and two metal skewers? Come on.” He held up his haul and waved the silverware around.

“It’s a temporary assignment, I told you. And you’re still not supposed to be here.”

“Don’t care, it’s still inconsistent and stupid.” Clint sat down in the less duct-taped chair as Coulson brought over the egg skillet, slicing through the mass of whites with the spatula to put three over-medium yolks on each plate. A moment later he was back with the bacon, and the toast, now exactly browned, came last. 

“This all looks a lot better than the plastic-wrapped Danish I was expecting to have from the box of them in my office,” Coulson said, sitting down across the table.

“Probably everything is better than a plastic-wrapped Danish from a box,” Clint agreed. “I mean, I’m not into the whole clean-eating superfoods nutria-bullet thing, but like, I’m not sure that’s even food.”

“So I’ve been told.” Coulson cut through a yolk with a spoon and scooped the egg bite onto the toast. “Also, a nutria is a large rodent.

“Of unusual size?”

“No, usual size, for a nutria.”

“Fine, anyway, whirlykale and algae supplements, not my bag, but still they’re better than plastic food.”

“Old habits die hard.”

“Don’t I know it,” Clint said. “Old habits and old friends, 99% of the trouble in my life.” He shrugged and turned around, leaning back on two chair legs to open the fridge (hey, the table was _fine_ for leverage and not _every_ old habit was bad), grabbing out a couple little OJ bottles that had been in a six-pack. He handed one to Coulson, then took the lid off his and held it up. “To new friends and better habits?”

“New friends. Not sure I can ditch the bad habits.”

“Good enough.”

\--

Clint did not move out of his box-hut. Actually, it was kind of perfect. Sure, boring and tiny, and at least initially enormously undersupplied, but that last part was fixable, and on the upside, there was only one neighbor, because seriously, Coulson really had put in an order, and made it stick, to put no one else in the surrounding block. No one nearby to crank out obnoxious electronica at 5am for living room crossfit or whatever the fuck that had been who the hell chose extra extreme exercise at 5am when they already had regular military training all damn day anyway (true story, Clint maybe had accidentally built a tiny needle-trebuchet system to deliver a death blow to that asshole’s stereo through the screen from his living room one day when the windows were all open, GOD). No one to be annoyed by Clint’s penchant for singing classic rock in the shower (okay, and the occasional 90’s boyband song because no one is perfect). And, critically, one kind of awesome neighbor with no one better to hang out with.

And who was enough of a smartass to take deadpan shots about large rodents over breakfast. Score.

So, okay, there was still requalifying to do on a ton of shit, and also more PT for the stupid knee which apparently healed slower now that he was on the wrong side of thirty because there weren’t enough other irritating aspects of aging. But this was made up for by shared suppers two or three or maybe five days a week ( _Hey Clint, I have the charcoal hot anyway, you have anything you want to toss on?_ Or, _Cooking real mac and cheese from scratch isn’t really a one-person thing, Coulson, come eat._ ). 

Getting more and better supplies wasn’t that hard, and by the time Clint had a real shower curtain, towels with magical water-absorption properties, and silverware that would allow two people to eat both soup _and_ salad without sharing, the place was starting to feel like home, temporary or not.

Also, Coulson thought the needle-trebuchet story was hilarious, and Clint appreciated his appreciation and told more bad-neighbor stories while they washed the dishes.

The first time Coulson actually did break into Clint’s place at two a.m. with a knife in hand was a little tense, sure, but Clint disarmed him easily enough, and settled in with him on the couch to wait for him to figure out where he was, Coulson staring at the far wall and gasping periodically for air; Clint just waiting until he shook whatever was chasing him and offering a shoulder to lean against for a while before walking him home because it was real clear he was not going to go see a professional in the middle of the night ugh.

He didn’t get any more sleep that night, checking out the window every once in a while to see him pacing next door (nothing he could do, still hated it), and then he didn’t see him at all except window glimpses for nearly a week after that, which sucked, but then the next Sunday there were hot coals ready for a steak again, and everything went back to normal, more or less. It took a couple of days for Coulson to acknowledge the incident and longer yet for him to be ready to talk about it, but Clint had seen that before, too, and knew all about not pushing because honestly, best of intentions and all, but sending someone into a flashback of a terrible experience wasn’t really a great price for having good intentions.

\--

“So, I did successfully break into an adjacent property,” he said, late one evening while Clint was working on deciding whether he was going to be sore enough from the fucking five-story thirty-villain obstacle course PT had sent him through _six progressively-more-complicated times_ that day to smear Icy Hot on anything. Honestly, what were the odds on a regular day that a bad guy who was actually a yeti would pop out of a fourth-floor window exuding poisonous gas, zipline to the next building while tossing a grenade into the window he’d come from, scare a bunch of civilians out into the open, shoot a rocket-launcher which apparently he had been hiding in his ass at Clint’s position, and be holding a dead-man switch that released state secrets if he died before Clint got to him to take the switch? 

Okay, it was him, so probably non-zero, but still. But thinking about it was distracting him enough that he almost missed Phil’s point. “Yep,” he said. 

Phil didn’t say anything.

“What? Well I mean, I said I’d disarm you and I did, and then we waited. You wanna talk about it, or…?”

“You seem very calm about the whole thing?”

“You’ve seen my jacket. You know I grew up weird.”

“And that included—“

“Let’s just say, a high proportion of people who run away from the world and take up with a traveling show that they could pretty much disappear from at any stop because no one would have time to stick around and look for them? Have Bad Shit in their past.”

“I’d never really thought about that.”

“Yeah, I mostly don’t either.”

“Other people, or the bad shit you were running from?”

“Nah, other people. I didn’t exactly choose the circus – it chose me? I dunno. When I bailed it was a little more complicated and a little more terrible than just ditching, but the bad shit in my past…” Clint paused. It wasn’t true he didn’t have some trauma, and probably some of the way he was was built on a foundation of crisis and avoidance, but he’d never had anything a reasonable person would call a panic attack or a flashback, exactly. “The bad shit in my past was probably formative, but not in quite the same way. You?”

“I don’t want to tell you about the actual—“

“Kay. How do you feel about Food Network?” Clint had continued making some small improvements to the hut over time because as long as he was here he might as well be comfortable; besides a bed that someone larger than a nine-year-old would like, he’d bought a TV fifth-hand (or thereabouts) from a guy four blocks over who was shipping out to somewhere in the Asian Pacific for $40 three weeks ago, and been happy to find that when he plugged into the cable jack, it Just Worked. “I think _Beat Bobby Flay_ is on in a few.”

“Who’s Bobby Flay?

“Aw, okay, so you can root for him and I’ll root for everyone else.”

“I wasn’t saying we shouldn’t talk about the situation, just I don’t want to describe why I have the problem.”

“Yeah, well that’s between you and your shrink and also if you decide you wanna tell me later, that’s okay too. But either way, now we know I can disarm you anyway, so.”

“I haven’t come to with a knife since.”

“Hey, that’s more than a week! We can get neighbors!” Clint frowned. “Wait, this means I gotta put up with other neighbors.”

“Not exactly. I don’t know I’m safe with _other_ people. Just you.”

Clint turned on the TV anyway. “It wasn’t hard. I think you’re safe around kids. But I mean, you can just stay here in the first place, and if knives come up, I’ll take them before things get out of hand.”

Phil gave him a funny look. “You inviting me for a sleepover?”

“Yeah, don’t change the subject, but idiotic rules about military personnel and fraternization notwithstanding, if the question is do I want you in my bed, I’m just going to point out that before we met I spent several minutes watching you do underwear yoga, so like, it can’t be news? Plus I stayed here as your only neighbor, plus we basically eat together four and a half out of five meals, so.”

“I didn’t want to make any assumptions. Also, what exactly are you proposing?”

Clint held up the Icy Hot he’d bought earlier and left on the counter. “Well, considering my everything is too sore for much else, at the moment I’m thinking cuddling and disarmament. However, tomorrow I’m open to suggestions.”

“Cuddling and disarmament sounds like a plan,” Phil said. “Although either of us could get redeployed pretty much any time – you have to be pretty well in field shape at this point. Why no move until now?”

“Idiotic rules about military personnel and fraternization. I mean, I don’t like them, but I was aware they were a thing and I try to only break rules on purpose. Also, my deployments usually involve me being, not to brag, but in better than just field shape if there’s a choice, so.”

“You and I haven’t been in the same chain of command anyway. And this is not ordinary military.”

“Yeah the rule I’m breaking on purposes is more about asking and telling, because even if they’ve mostly taken that out of the rulebook, it’s... Anyway, beer?” He grabbed two from the fridge and plunked down on Phil next to the couch. “Cuddling to commence while we watch… either Mary Jo or Cornelius hand Flay his ass. I hope they make him cook something he’s never heard of.”

Phil took his beer and let Clint put an arm around his shoulders. They watched for a few minutes. “This show doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“Yeah, but watch anyway, we might learn about important rules for what constitutes great North African street food or something. Last time I learned about shokasomething or other I keep meaning to look up, where you make this tomato stew and then crack eggs to poach on top of it for the last part of cooking.”

“Shakshuka. I’ve never had it.”

“Well it sounds awesome.”

\--

Clint was, in fact open to suggestions in the morning, and sometime just after dawn he determined that Phil’s ninja yoga whatever workout was useful for more than just hand to hand combat. For example, it made him flexible enough to curl down and reach his tongue to the tip of Clint’s dick while he was fucking him. And strong enough to do it standing. Jesus.

By Wednesday, Clint had gone to the PX to get some kind of standing wardrobe contraption for Phil to hang his shirts and jackets on because honestly, keeping him in bed for the extra five minutes was totally worth it. Plus, he was between assignments and he never knew how long that was going to last (range so far in his life: four hours to eight months), so he might as well make things more comfortable.

Phil woke in a panic that same night, but it was relatively short-lived, and once they were back in bed, Phil rolled in close, wrapping himself around Clint and falling asleep quickly. He also woke Clint in the morning with a truly fantastic blowjob before absolutely pounding him into the mattress, both parts of which Clint was completely okay with.

Within about three weeks, they’d started using their two huts as a weird two-room apartment with an outdoor hallway between them – Clint put his gear at Phil’s place, stopping by to pick it up as needed. They stored beer and soda in Phil’s fridge. They brought Phil’s crappy living room chair over so they’d have a second in the living room. And if Clint suspected Phil might be taking advantage of available sex to chase away whatever ghosts were on his tail, because in the two additional cases where he’d wakened in a cold sweat, he hadn’t waited for morning? Well, whatever, it was obviously working for both of them.

\--

Clint looked up at the clock, then back at the control booth and frowned. His time was pretty good – not his best ever, but then, he also wasn’t 23 anymore. What he’d lost in speed, he’d more than made up for in ingenuity and range. But what was Phil doing in the control booth?

He grabbed a water bottle and a towel, mopping his hair and slugging down half the bottle on the walk back. “Hey,” he said.

Phil was wearing another suit (typical), but his face was still and stern as he said, “Specialist.” Clint shoved aside the weird uncertain feeling that brought to him – sure, he saw Phil dressed like this every morning as he headed off to his office, but usually Phil still called him by name? 

“What’s up?”

“Phil Coulson, Assistant Deputy Director, Covert Operations.”

Clint snuck a quick glance at Guaratelli, the obstacle course supervisor, but he didn’t seem to think anything was unusual, so he shrugged. “Barton, which you probably know. Sniper.”

“We have an assignment,” Phil said.

Clint shrugged again. “I got time to shower and pack up my kit?”

“1530, Building H. The Director would like to discuss this one personally.” Phil waited for Clint’s nod, then straightened his cuffs and turned to go.

“Uh, Coulson?”

“Yes?”

“Have we met before?”

Phil pursed his lips. “I’ve been in the office of the quartermaster on light duty for some time. We may have crossed paths.”

“Ah.”

And then Phil left, and Guaratelli let out a breath. “What an asshole.”

“You think?”

“I _know_. How do you think I ended up building playgrounds?”

“What’d you do before?”

“Little of this, little of that. Not a bad sniper, and not a bad scout, but one bad mission… He was overseeing mostly stuff out west until just recently, which is how I ended up here, out of his chain.”

“You _were_ who fucked it up, though?”

“Yeah, but _one_ bad mission…”

Clint nodded. “Well, sometimes it’s just the wrong place, man. But if it makes you feel any better you make awesome playgrounds, so I mean, maybe it was just the _right_ place.” 

“Still. He took over for Kassemeier eight months ago, then got into a fuckup that was way worse than anything _I_ did. 

“Oh, I was in the field then, so… Yeah, I wondered who they tapped, figured I’d find out sooner or later. But yeah, I better haul, then, if I only got half an hour. Thanks.”

And that was how Clint found himself, reeling a little from the change in Phil’s demeanor, in a room with Phil and the director 35 minute later, reading through a list of mission objectives for a trip to Bulgaria, asking and answering questions until everyone understood the mission.

When he got back to his hut, he jumped in the shower again, feeling a weird urge to rinse off the encounter with heat and good soap.

“Clint?”

He stuck his head out of the steam. “So, are you Coulson, or Phil right now?”

“Phil. Sorry. I wasn’t authorized to warn you.”

“I… see. Well, I guess we met in the supply room, then. Um, but so you’re the AIC on this, one, and that’s a chain of command.”

“Covert Ops doesn’t care,” Phil said. “But I am. And it looks like we’re both back in the field.”

“Yeah, I figured. Hey, how come Covert Ops doesn’t actually know we’re neighbors?”

“I never lifted the restriction on this block,” Phil said. “Records thinks you’re in the box you were actually assigned.”

Clint blinked a little at that; it’d been some four and a half months, and surely someone should have known? But then, he hadn’t had anyone but Phil in his place, and no one had needed to deliver any orders or supplies because basically his whole job was getting and staying ready for deployment and as long as he reported where he was supposed to, everything else didn’t really matter, so maybe it was possible. Still, weird.

“Right, so on mission we’re strangers?”

“All but,” Phil said.

“Kay.” Clint went back to soaping, swallowing the unexpected bitter taste that left in his mouth.

Somehow, he’d gone and fallen for a goofy damaged badass, and now he was supposed to work with him? Damn it, why was this his life. 

But, they weren’t shipping out until 0530, so… “Hey Phil?”

He heard the door open again. “Yes?”

“So, we don’t turn into pumpkins until midnight, right? Still on for steaks and grilled corn?”

There was a long pause, and then Phil said, “I hadn’t made other arrangements.”

And yeah, Clint was going to take what he could get, because what was happening after this seemed pretty up in the air.

He got out of the shower and tossed on sweatpants, then started on the rub for the steaks. If he only got Phil for one more night, he was making it count..

\--

Crawling out of bed at 3:30 in the morning was never Clint’s favorite, but it was way worse to do that and then watch Phil wake up, still soft and pink and warm (and very naked, a little whisker-burned on his thighs and with a prominent hickey on one collarbone), then squint at the clock and get up to shower and dress, hardening by degrees into the suits-and-shades officer he’d been at the obstacle course.

Phil’s clothes were mostly in Clint’s space, so it wasn’t until well after four that Phil stepped out the front door and went back to his own place to pick up whatever else he needed and head over to Operations. As he went out the door, he said, “See you after we’re back,” and okay, so maybe he got more than one more night? But they’d be on the same mission, so apparently Clint was expected to play like they were strangers throughout? Not that he couldn’t; he’d been accepted as people he hated on a variety of missions and so he could do this. Right? It was just for a few days.

Actually, Clint was torn though – would he exchange the vanishing of his Phil into Coulson, maybe on a daily basis, for evenings watching bad reality TV over shared meals and nights curled together after, more often than not, great sex that he wanted to keep having? Was this enough bad to offset that good? 

He thought about while he took his own shower and put together something to eat; he was only a specialist, after all, and he could show up at 0527 and toss his shit on the plane, so he had some time. Still, by the time he checked he’d turned everything off and triple-checked his gear, he’d come to only two conclusions: 1. Probably he should eventually convey to someone somewhere that he’d been living here if for no other reason than to get his shit cleared out if he died on a mission, and 2. He was probably going to keep right on taking what he could get from Coulson, because really, where was he going to do better?

The whole thing was still confusing, though, and as he jogged up to the plane, he couldn’t help thinking that he might not be acting in his own interests, great sex or not.

\--

The mission went longer than it should have. Ten days instead of one, the intel spotty and just wrong enough they had to regroup half a dozen times. Phil (Coulson, Clint. Coulson. You gotta go back to calling him Coulson) wasn’t with them in the field at first, but late on day nine, just as Clint was getting good at not getting a knot in his stomach pretending not to know him over the comms, a chopper landed a couple hundred yards from the field base, and there he was.

Clint suppressed a sigh and waited for him to step into the tent before looking up and “noticing” him for the benefit of Wilson and Moretti. “Sir,” he said.

“Working the intel from base wasn’t having the desired result,” Coulson said. He was wearing tactical gear, a look Clint hadn’t seen before, and it was harder than he was happy about not to swallow his tongue, but he managed.

Clint nodded. “Couldn’t agree more, sir.” He took a long drink from his canteen and set it back down. “So what now?”

Moretti crossed his arms over his chest. “Yeah, cause we got shit for info out here.”

Coulson looked at each of them, lingering on Clint. “Moretti and I will go in and assess the situation first-hand. Barton, you’ll hang back, maintain readiness in case what we find is a great reason to go in immediately.”

Clint wanted, badly, to ask whether Coulson was good to go into an unstable situation, but shit, he didn’t really have any right to ask, and also it was insulting _and_ at least the way he wanted to ask it, it would out their …prior association. So he nodded. “Now?”

“Blake is still working on a little research in town. He wanted another four hours when I left—three hours flight time, so make it fifty minutes, but it’s late. Dawn would be better.”

Clint gestured to the chair across from him. “You play poker, sir?”

“You want me to? Keep in mind my day job is maintaining a poker face.”

“Keep in mind so’s mine, and then I shoot someone.”

Coulson snorted, but sat. “No, no poker for me, but don’t let me stop you.”

Unsurprisingly, the rest of the team didn’t want to play under the eyes of a senior officer, and after a minute Moretti got up and said he was going to take a piss. Wilson followed him out for a perimeter check, and Clint found himself looking across the table at Phil.

“How are you?” Phil asked after a moment.

“Uh. We doin’ this?”

“No one here but bugs and snakes,” Coulson said.

“Yeah, but. Anyway, I’m fine. My main job is wait until someone points me at a target, and that hasn’t happened yet, so. You?”

“Pissed we’re still here.”

“Fair. Least it’s warm. Freezing my balls off isn’t on my agenda for this year.”

Coulson’s gaze darkened a little and his lips quirked, but he didn’t say anything.

“Anyway, you good?” It didn’t escape Clint’s notice that seated, sunglasses off, Phil looked tired, and yeah, okay, an op that kept everyone up late a bunch refiguring everything over and over would do that, but so would sleep loss from panic attacks he wasn’t there to soothe, and dammit, he needed not to go down this path when there was nothing he could do about it.

“Mostly. No sleep, but that’s typical.” 

Clint didn’t ask which kind of typical it was.

When Moretti came back, Coulson stood and crossed to him to talk about gear, and Clint tried not to listen to him talk about going into danger, up close and personal.

Yeah, okay, so new opinion: he was compromised as fuck, and no one but the compromisee knew it, and he didn’t want him to tell. Shit.

He deliberately put in his earbuds and set about not listening to them, but he couldn’t help watching out the corner of his eye, assessing every move Phil made as they rigged up a place for him to get a nap between everyone else’s pallets.

Sleeping ten feet away was, Clint concluded around ten, when everyone was quiet and Moretti was outside on watch, was terrible. Finally, he got up and went to sit on the floor next to Phil, who was also not asleep, and said very quietly, to not wake Wilson, “You know I’ll still disarm you, right? Like, it’s not a problem?” 

Phil nodded slightly in the dark, and reached a hand out for Clint’s thigh. They stayed that way until shortly before Moretti came in at two, and Clint thought maybe, probably, Phil managed to get some sleep ahead of their 0445 departure plan.

\--

Naturally, the danger was up closer and personaler than anyone expected, and twenty-three minutes after they’d headed out Clint’s phone lit up with ten messages in about eight seconds, four from Moretti that collectively conveyed mostly just FUCKFUCKFUCK and six from Phil, of which five detailed a position and half a plan, and the sixth of which was just _fucking be careful if you draw attention it will fall on us first_ , and like, come on, man. Clint was _Hawkeye_. He was goddamn famous for sneaking, stealthing, climbing, and shooting. Being a circus act was only something he did for a fucking _reason_.

But he was already suited up, waiting to be called on, and he was out the door with his various gear strapped to his back and waist in less than a minute. His assigned position, which he wasn’t promising to use until he got eyes on the situation because sure, he trusted Phil but he was _Hawkeye_ , was a little over a mile out, and sure, he could have gone at a near-sprint and been there in probably six minutes and change, but he took eight and made sure not to be seen.

The perch Phil had chosen was great: clear line of sight, good defensive options, unlikely to be observed by either the bad guys or random civilians that might happen by, climbable by the experienced but not an amateur (and easy for Clint), so he went up without questioning and arranged himself to start picking off the rear guard first so the guys up front would have no warning when he started putting arrows in them.

Four arrows, four dead guards, and Clint paused for a second to text to Phil, _back four down, at least eleven left outside two went in, you got ammo?_ His phone vibrated _not much_ just as he took out the two nearest the door (which _was_ going to draw attention when the rest of the group came back around, but fuck, the guys inside were a bigger problem), then replied, _got ears_?

 _Ears yes voice no two assholes twenty feet._ Clint sighed and started watching the window as he clicked on his mike. “Which room, starting from the north, are YOU in?”

_Second floor, second room._

“’Kay, so two guys that came in before, they’re probably who you can hear. Three more just found the guards I deadified up front and went running in but they’re still downstairs. If I take them out it’ll probably draw them back out looking for me, so I’ll have to move. Can you get the two without pulling them back in?” So, silently, was Clint’s point. After all, yoga ninja.

_Affirm._

Clint chose his shot and put an arrow through the ear of one of the downstairs assholes, then between ribs by way of the armhole on a tac vest before Guy Three caught a clue and got out of view of windows. Overhead, Phil (who was bloody from at least a gash to his forehead and maybe more if that was all his blood and oh hey maybe mention that you asshole?) had a guy in a sleeper hold and Moretti was taking aim at another, and for fuck’s sake. “Moretti if you fire that gun I am shooting you,” he said into his mike. “Come on, man. If you do that then everyone comes in the building and now they know to stay under the windows so like, don’t.”

Moretti dropped his gun as Clint dropped another arrow, into Moretti’s guy’s throat. “Okay, we’re good inside. There’s still one downstairs that I think has not bugged out unless he went out the back door but now everyone else is coming my way and making use of cover. They definitely split up, three groups… they’re going to end up with a line on me before I can get them all, so I think I gotta bail. Coulson, you good?”

Phil, who had dropped out of view beneath the window (good move, in case anyone looked back), put up one hand in a thumbs-up, and Clint took that to mean whatever his injury was, it wasn’t _that_ bad, so he stowed his gear enough for climbing and made his way down fifteen feet, then jumped down onto a sloped roof and started running around on a long loop to Phil’s position while he called back to Wilson for exfil because regardless of anything else, there was no way they weren’t totally blown on this.

By the time he arrived, Moretti had put a tolerable, if sloppy, field dressing on the forehead gash and wrapped a decent bandage around the shoulder slice that had been the source of a lot of the blood, and Phil was sitting calmly explaining the situation to, presumably, Wilson or Blake or both.

“Okay, so that was not how this was supposed to go. Also, none of the guys I took out was the cell leader, so we still have that problem,” Clint said. “But he does have less fodder for the meat grinder going forward.”

“We don’t still have that problem,” Phil said. He pointed at the guy he’d taken down, who had half a cut throat—a wound that had been stopped halfway, jagged and bloody but not bloody enough to have killed him. “That’s the cell leader.”

Clint turned his head. “Huh. Sure enough. You conflicted about whether to kill him?”

Phil looked up at Clint, eyes hard. “Maybe. But, he’s coming with us for questioning.”

“Yeah, I have ammo for you both, but if I carry him I’m stuck with one handgun only.”

“I can take him,” Phil said. “But are you saying you can’t do it with just the handgun?”

“Uh, no. Sir. I can do it, but it loses the benefit of silence.” Clint shrugged. “But I guess Moretti will be shooting with me anyway, so. Also, hell no you are not carrying him; you have holes in you.”

Moretti caught the clip Clint tossed him, and another for his pocket, and Clint picked up Phil’s gun and reloaded it. “We should go.”

Phil pushed up against the wall. “Part of the game,” he said, bending to pick up their prisoner, but Clint stepped in front of him.

“Nope. I got him.” Clint handed back the gun. “You’re on rear guard, and I’m on one hand for shooting, one for meat shield. In case you’re about to say you’re in command, I’mma cite 207E-3: injury to AIC.”

Phil scowled, but took the gun and nodded at Moretti to help get Clint situated.

Twenty minutes later they were back to the tent, where Wilson was packed up and loading onto a chopper. Clint dumped the asshole onto the floor and jumped up in after, taking up the guard position in the doorway, then helped Phil in just before bullets started flying again. Moretti landed in the chopper, already dead, and Wilson jumped in over him, swearing about two bullets in his left thigh and wrist, and whoever was on the stick took off immediately, pulling them high out of handgun range in seconds. 

Clint dragged Moretti’s body the rest of the way in, slid the door closed, and sighed. “Well. That sucked. Also, I cannot fucking believe I am going to be on PT again already.” 

Phil looked up from where he was working on Wilson’s shattered wrist (OK, at least he wasn’t doing PT for _that_ mess because that was going to suuuuuuck), and Clint pointed at a seeping hole in the meat of his calf. “Bullet’s still in, and it’ll keep,” he said. “But I complete the set.” He waved his arm around. “Four in healthy, four out not. Nice and neat.”

Phil scowled, and Clint sat with a thump in the rear-facing seat just behind the pilot. “Who’s flying us?”

“Melinda May. I don’t know if you’ve met.”

Clint shook his head, then leaned back and closed his eyes. “Wake me if she needs relief.”

“She won’t.”

\--

Clint was back in his hut ninety minutes after they returned to base, his calf stitched shut and a probably-overkill set of crutches leaning against the corner. Crutches tied up his hands, and that always made him nervous, but he’d used them to leave Medical in exchange for not being kept overnight.

Where he wanted to be was the surgical wing, where Phil was getting his shoulder fixed up, but as far as he knew, that was still not who they were so instead he just waited.

Finally, around seven-thirty, he heard rustling next door and looked out the bedroom window to see Phil wrestling left-handed with his door, a young man Clint didn’t know standing with him looking like it would be way faster to just do it for him. He waited, ten minutes, then fifteen, as Phil managed to get in, then changed into a clean shirt with some difficulty and had some probably-doctor’s order water with a painkiller, then looked pained at the pile of Clint’s stuff on his bedroom floor once his helper left.

At a quarter to nine, Clint sighed and grabbed one crutch to lean on, then went out his door, between the huts, and to Phil’s. He knocked.

Phil didn’t answer, so he knocked again and then again. Finally, he leaned the crutch up against the narrow space between the door and the single-pane front window, and hopped over to look in.

Phil was awake, so Clint shook his head and went back to knock one more time. “Come on, Phil. It’s not like I can’t see you in there.”

Finally, he heard movement, and then Phil opened the door. He looked like shit. “Barton.”

“Barton? Oh, are we still on the clock? I always thought stitches were a pretty good substitute for a clock-out, unless they happen actually in the field.”

“Barton, I… are you here to get your things?”

Clint shook his head. “We should talk, eventually, about this—“ he waved his fingers back and forth between the two of them. “However, right now, I am here to check on you. You weren’t as conscious as I’d have liked by the time we touched down.”

“I’m fine.”

“Mmm. I see. They give you blood?”

“Just one unit.”

“Cool. Concussion check?”

“I passed.”

“Have you ever given them a legitimate baseline for that?”

“I. That’s very much not your concern.”

“What?”

Phil sighed. “Look, I’m tired and I’m waiting for the painkiller to kick in. If you want to gather up your shit, go ahead, but—“

Clint limped in the door and closed it behind him, then bodily propelled Phil to the couch. It was the only seat in the living room now, with Phil’s chair in Clint’s hut, but that was fine, since what he needed to do was lie down. “I’ll keep watch,” he said.

“I’m in my living room.”

“Which you don’t allow anyone to live adjacent to because you might sleepmurder them. I seriously doubt today helped with that.”

“I don’t know, no one got tortured on my watch this time.” Phil pressed his lips together. “Just killed and maimed.”

“How’s Wilson?”

“In surgery, when I left. The leg was fine but the wrist might never be.”

“Okay, so he’s probably on me anyway. I probably could have run two percent faster? Or stayed to take out the guys following? Or just stayed as decoy?”

“No.” Phil’s voice was hard as rocks, and he looked suddenly furious despite that he was still too pale to have much in the way of blood pressure to bring up.

“Hey, okay. I’m just saying, his maiming is probably not on you. Moretti was a lucky shot all the way, should have hit him in the shoulder except for timing. So like, you did everything you should have, and sometimes this is the deal.”

“I _know_ sometimes this is the deal. What I don’t know is how the shit I have put myself in a position of not being able to handle it. If I’m going to react like this every time—“

“Like what?”

Phil was quiet a long time, and Clint wondered if in fact the painkiller had kicked in. Then he said, “I didn’t take the pills.”

“You should. You need the sleep.”

“There’s no way I’m safe to—“

“I will always disarm you.”

“You won’t always be there.”

What Clint wanted to say was _bullshit_ , but it was true; they had no formal attachment and the agency didn’t even know they had ever met outside of operational proceedings. Still, all at once he realized that actually it _was_ bullshit, because he was staying. So he said so.

Phil pressed his lips together again, and then said, “Get out. We’ll figure out the chair in the morning.”

“What? No, I—“

“Get out.” Phil sounded calm, serious, and sure even though he was literally shaking with fatigue. 

Clint considered his options, most of which seemed like they would probably be detrimental in some way, then put up his hands and went back to the front door, scooping up his crutch and limping back to his own place.

It wasn’t like he couldn’t more or less keep an eye on Phil from there until he fell asleep. He’d fall asleep eventually, right?

\--

He did, and so did Clint. But, just as the sun was lighting up the horizon, there he was in Clint’s living room. With a knife. Again.

Clint sighed and took the knife, then dragged Phil into bed with him to wait it out.

Phil woke shortly after six, smiled at Clint then scowled and jumped up, picked up his knife, and went home. He started to try to drag the chair with him, but obviously he didn’t have full use of both hands, and after a moment he just left it. Clint moved it back out of the path of the door and went back to bed for another couple hours, and then, before his check-in with Medical took the chair back to Phil’s hut. 

Yeah, okay, he was not going to mention that activity to the doctor. Ow. He figured he’d leave the rest of his crap in place for the time being.

\--

The next night he didn’t take Phil into bed with him, but put him down on the couch and sat waiting in the chair he still had. 

When Phil woke up, Clint didn’t move, just let him pick up his knife and leave, and then went back to bed. When he got up an hour before his first new appointment with PT, he found his stuff in a box on his porch.

Fine.

When Phil came in that night, Clint took the knife with him and went back to bed, leaving Phil on the couch. He was gone when Clint got up. Clint still had the knife.

The next night, he didn’t show at all, which mostly just made Clint worry. Also, he wondered at what point he should report that a senior officer desperately needed some competent Psych help.

The next night, he arrived on schedule shortly after midnight, but he wasn’t actually asleep, a fact which was immediately clear to Clint regardless of how he was kind of pretending he was, new knife and all.

Clint raised his eyebrows. “What’s this? I mean, sleepmurdering is one thing, but like, are you here for non-sleep murdering? I do still have the use of both hands, yanno.”

Phil pretended to be asleep for just a few more seconds, then gave up and sighed. “You’re supposed to feel like this is too much of a pain in the ass and move back to the place you officially live.”

“First problem: I can’t move back to somewhere I’ve never been. Second problem: you’re not a pain in the ass. Third problem: if I were further away I would just be worrying from there and also not able to see if you were okay.”

Phil blinked. “What.”

“What what?” Clint closed the door Phil had left open and went to get a mug from the cabinet and a pan to put on the stove. “Like, I said it was bullshit I wasn’t going to be there, if it was up to me. It’s not my call if you don’t want to keep on with the, you know, everything, but man, I wasn’t looking for a way out. Hot chocolate?”

“Hot chocolate?”

“Yeah. It’s made with milk and sugar and chocolate? You drink it? Put in mint if you’re fancy, which I am not, maybe some whipped cream or marshmallows?”

“I know what it _is_. Why are you offering me hot chocolate in the middle of the night when I broke into your house to make you go away?”

“Okay, so what my shrink would say is that my self-image is still shit and I don’t know when to stop letting someone kick me. But like, I have that past and I know it, and this is not it.”

“Oh?”

“Oh. Hot chocolate? Clint held up the cocoa in one hand and the sugar in the other. “I have measuring to do.”

Phil stared at him, then sat down at the kitchen table. “Hot chocolate. But you’re going to have to tell me what it is, if it is not that.”

“Umno, you and I need to talk about this, obviously, but I already said a bunch and you have said exactly nothing about why you are kicking me out, so like, go.” Clint poured milk into his cocoa and sugar mix and turned on the heat as he stirred.

“Because I _cannot_ learn to just assume you’re going to be there to disarm me. Which clearly I already did, but if I can’t unlearn it, I need to be off the roster.”

“Pssh. I told you that was bullshit, and also I have no idea why you didn’t know that. We, like, moved furniture. And then you got all commanding officer on my ass, but I played your game because fine that rule is stupid but I get that it’s still a rule or at least a...I don’t know, it’s a thing we do in organizations like ours. But I did check, and your position and mine… we can be posted together, so I don’t know why I wouldn’t be there when you sleep.”

“You checked? Why?”

“To find out the answer? If it was going to be a logistical problem I was going to start figuring out how to make it not one.”

Phil shook his head. “I’m not your problem.”

“You’re totally my problem. I volunteered as tribute, but it was an easy gig. Also I got un. fucking. believable. orgasms out of the deal, but that’s not everything. I also got someone who wanted to listen to me talk, so like, how is that a bad deal for me? Seriously, what better deal would I ever get, but I’m not saying I’d settle for you because you’re like, aspirational? There was no settling because that implies aiming low.” Clint stirred and kept an eye on his cocoa. “You?”

“I don’t know what to say to that, but sending you in was terrible and seeing you hurt was terrible and I don’t want to do either of those again. But I’ll have to, so.”

“Nature of the beast, yes. But still, that doesn’t explain why you were kicking me out.”

“I told you. I’m dependent. I’m compromised--”

“Ha, that’s exactly what I thought while we were in the damn tent: that I was compromised as shit. Do you think I liked seeing _you_ bleed?”

“I hadn’t really thought about that.”

“But anyway. All you really gotta say is you’ll stay, although I’d like to know why you didn’t already know I was in.”

Phil gestured to himself. “ _I_ was getting unbelievable orgasms, but come on, look at you, and look at me. You’re exceptional, and I’m a logistics guy with untreated PTSD.”

“We should probably work on the treatment part,” Clint said casually. “It’s not that you’re a pain in the ass, but I mean, I would really like to see what happens if you get regular sleep and aren’t working on a panic attack twice a week if you’ve been rocking my world on catnaps and distress. I can’t imagine it wouldn’t be better. Also, fuck that ‘look at you part. _Look_ at you. Plus also I read the parts of your file I can get to, and you are not, I mean super not, totally not, absolutely not, ‘a logistics guy with PTSD.’ Please. Why is this a part of the conversation?” He poured the cocoa into the mug he’d gotten out already and handed that to Phil, then dug for a second one and poured his own. 

Phil took a drink. “I don’t think anyone has made me bad-dream cocoa since my grandmother when I was eight.”

“Yeah, well, I’m willing to lay in a supply of sugar and chocolate. For your ‘bad dreams’.” He made finger quotes. “Also, for serious did you try to break up with me because you wanted me more than you thought I wanted you, without asking? I thought maybe it was just all about command structure or something which would also suck and hey by the way we could fight that fight together, I’m in? But you thinking I didn’t want you, that’s a terrible fucking reason. Like, I grew up actually in a circus and I know better than that shit come _on._ ”

“No, I tried to break up with you because it scared the shit out of me that I was not only falling in love with you but dependent on you. Still, I probably should have used words.”

“Yeah, well, you were injured. I guess we can let it slide. This time. Also, you _are_ letting me take you back to bed, right, and the hell with rules about fraternization?”

Phil shrugged. “It sounds so simple when you say it like that. But obviously I have some work to do. Also, I don’t give a shit about archaic structural rules, but I said before, Covert Ops has other priorities anyway.”

“Yeah, okay, And we’ll go talk with Psych in the morning. I looked yesterday to see who was around because I was waffling about whether to tell someone to come have a look at you – which I wasn’t that happy about, by the way, but making you hate me if you actually needed the help, um. Anyway. Caroline Taub was on the staff when I was in California, and she’s cool. Or I’ve heard good things about Marty Jarrett.”

“Yeah, maybe we work that part out in the morning. Right now, I want homemade but not-fancy cocoa and some sleep.”

“With cuddles,” Clint clarified.

“With cuddles. Yes.” 

They sat and drank their cocoa quietly, and then Clint took both cups to the sink to rinse out, then held out his hand. “When I got here, I was pretty sure downtime for injuries was some kind of cosmic punishment,” he said. “But now, I dunno. I’m thinking there’s an upside?” They walked the ten feet to the bedroom, and Clint pushed the door open and let Phil go in ahead of him.

“So the circus is a real and substantial part of your childhood, not apocryphal?”

“Okay, I’m sure my file says. Plus, we’ve talked about this.”

“It does, but until I met you I thought it was poor research, and even recently I’ve thought maybe it was some kind of cover.”

“Nope. True blue American sideshow at your service. The good news is, it makes me really flexible.” Clint waggled his eyebrows. “Wanna see?”

“There’s lots of good news, and yes, but not now. Now, I want to lie here with you and figure out how to believe you want this. And then I’m going to make a list of the paperwork we’re going to need to do.”

“Aw, paperwork? No.”

“Paperwork, yes. But I’m hoping it will be worth it.”

“I didn’t really have a question about that.” Clint pulled Phil’s hoodie up and carefully over his head, gentle with the shoulder, and tossed it in the corner, following with his own shirt and sweatpants. “But that’s for later. Right now, I think we have better things to do.

**Author's Note:**

> Because the filename while I was working on this for roughly a thousand years was "neighbor" I was unable to ditch that while thinking about titles, and naturally Mr. Rogers came along for the ride. Couldn't be helped.
> 
> Originally posted [here](https://imagineclintcoulson.tumblr.com/post/164764044721/get-together-au-could-also-be-canon-divergence)


End file.
